XPS 420 - can I upgrade to a QX9650 CPU or not?? And, will I see a big jump in speed and performance?

Hello everyone,

 

I have a 3 year old Dell XPS 420 desktop system that came with the Q6700 CPU.    It also came with the Nvidia 8800GTX video card and I think 4GB of RAM.    I have now upgraded to 8GB of RAM, but I still have the same processor and video card. 

This is a computer that I use for personal use and business......really a little bit of everything.    So, anything that I do to upgrade it is tax deductible and that certainly makes the investment more affordable.    Even though, for the most part, the system is plenty fast, I would like to consider upgrading it to it's maximum potential before the parts needed to do so are out of the market and no longer available.    I made the mistake on my last Dell desktop of waiting too long to upgrade and by the time that I finally got around to investigating what I could do to make it faster, most of the stuff was so outdated (and not readily availalbe) that it just didn't make much sense.    I don't want to be stupid here and spend money for something that won't make much difference, but I am certainly willing to spend a few hundred bucks to get a noticeable improvement in both speed and performance if I can.

 

With that said, I have read just about every post on this forum regarding upgrading the processor in the XPS 420 system.   From what I can gather, the top of the line processors that would be available for this motherboard are the Q9650 and the QX9650.     And, though I am no processor expert, it would appear that the QX model is the faster and more high performance of the two.    It sounds like I would be getting a faster clock speed, a larger L2 cache and a faster FSB.........so, I can only assume that this would be noticeably faster than my current Q6700 processor.    Is that a correct assumption???    I have changed these CPU's before and just recently watched the Dell service tech do it on another system, so I have no doubt that I can handle it.   I have some of the thermal paste and he showed me exactly how to do it.    So, I don't think it would be a tough job.

 

Now, here are my questions?????       Is there a big difference between the Q9650 and the QX9650 and would I notice the difference in normal day to day work and play?   I am not a really big gamer, but I do just about everything else, including CAD and digital photo work.....and, I watch lots of video.    As I was reading the forums, someone made the comment, that the XPS 420 could use any socket 775 processor as long as it was one of the 65nm models.   Then, the lists that I saw included both the Q9650 and the QX9650.    But, if I am reading correctly, both of them are 45nm CPUs.    So, will it work or not??

 

The other thing that I noticed in my reading, was that some folks were saying that even though either of these processors would fit and work, that the XPS 420 motherboard wasn't really setup to take full advantage of what these faster processors had to offer.    In other words, I got the impression that I might put it in there and not really be getting what I was hoping to get with this upgrade.   

 

So, will the system be much quicker with one of these two processors?    Since this is a 1333 FSB instead of the slower FSB on my Q6700, will it work with my system and will I get the full advantage or will some of the features in this faster CPU just be backward compatible and not really give me the speed/performance increases that I am expecting because the motherboard, RAM or other system components are the real bottleneck and, no matter what I do, it just won't get that much faster than it is now??     I don't know all that much about RAM memory, but what I installed when I went up to 8GB was the same type of RAM that came with the system originally......I'm pretty sure that it was fairly standard DDR2 PC2-5300 memory.    Will this type of RAM work fine with the new, faster CPU?

 

So, in the end, I guess I'm asking three questions.............

 

Will either of these two processors work in this system  Q9650 or QX9650?

If one is a better choice than the other, which is the better choice and why?

And, will my system see a big speed/performance increase from the upgrade?

 

 

Also, is there more than one type of each of these processors?  In other words, are all QX9650's the same?   I noticed a few on ebay that had additional numbers after the QX9650, such as  SLAWN C1   or    SLAN3 C0    or just  SLAWN.     What do these suffixes mean?   Others are advertised as just QX9650 without any suffix.

 

OK.....this is my final question.......I promise.

 

I also have an XPS 430 system that is actually a little bit newer than the XPS 420.........but, they are very similar systems.   That one I got really cheap and I'm not but so interested in it being a super fast system, though it seems to do fine for what we use it for in my office.   It came with the Q8300 processor and has 6GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 4670 video card with 512MB on board.     If I do replace the CPU in my XPS 420 with a new Q9650 or QX9650, is there any sense in considering swapping the old Q6700 CPU into the XPS 430?    I'm not all that good at comparing that long list of processors that could work in the either of these two similar systems, but someone else told me that, of the two CPU's that I have now, that the Q6700 was actually a faster, beefier processor than the Q8300.   Is this true and, if so, would it be worth installing in the XPS 430?

 

 

Thanks for any help.

 

 

Bryan